If you’re using Ubuntu, you’ll know that the default music player of Ubuntu is Rhythmbox. Now thats quite a good media player, but I like the good looks and ‘do more’ things of Songbird, so I use it.

Now you might have noticed, when you press the Media key on your keyboard (I’m talking about a multimedia keyboard here of course), Rhythmbox opens up. If you’re a Songbird fan (like me), you can change that setting, so that everytime you press the media key on your keyboard its Songbird which starts.

The solution is pretty simple really.

Go to GNOME Menu > System > Preference > Preferred Applications

Then select the Multimedia tab. The preferred media player would obviously be selected as Rhythmbox, you’ll probably see something like this:

So what you should do right now, is select ‘Custom’ from the dropdown menu and then type ‘songbird‘ as the command. It should look this:

You need not check the ‘Run in terminal’ option.

Now close the window and press the Media key on your keyboard. Voila! Its Songbird in front of you.

However I couldnt get the Play, Pause, Next, Forward keys to work though. So thats a bit of a let down.

Finally, if you would like to revert back to Rhythmbox, you can do that by selecting your preferred Multimedia application as Rhythmbox. Easy peasy.

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2 Responses to “Songbird keyboard tweaks”

Very true. This modification will only help you to launch Songbird from the keyboard (via the “media” key). As I mentioned in the post, it wont help you play, pause, etc. But if Songbird is your preferred music player, this media key functionality will at least help you launch the player right from the comfort of your keyboard.